David Hare and a forgotten dream

The Power of Yes: A Dramatist Seeks to Understand the Financial Crisis by David Hare

David Hare

Here we have a remarkable play written by a remarkable writer. Hare wrote my candidate for the most beautiful screenplay ever written, his adaptation of The Hours. At any rate, I accidentally stumbled upon this, not having heard of it, and I not only find it to  be a remarkable play but a reminder of interests similar to this dramatic form very early in my career. So here's some back story.


In the late 1970s or early 1980s, probably the latter, I was contacted by an actor and arts wheeler-dealer in town, whose first name was Peter and last name was not Fornara, who wanted me to join him in an ambitious arts project. Somehow he had gotten his mits on an abandoned Victorian mansion off the east end of the Ross Island Bridge. It was in terrible shape (and eventually got destroyed). He wanted to salvage it and turn it into a kind of avant-garde arts center. This was before our Performing Arts Center was built. Well, I thought this was a visionary idea. I gladly wanted to be a part of it.

Peter's idea for my participation was to found a theater company in a basement space just made for a small theater. This would require a proposal in some detail because he was applying for significant grant money to bring this vision to reality. So I spent considerable time and energy proposing a theater company called "This is IT!", IT standing for "Idea Theater." 


I was relatively new to Portland but had had success in Maryland by writing and producing a grant-supported dramatic history of the First Amendment. I liked the challenge of dramatizing issues and ideas, which is rather what Hare is up to above. At any rate, Idea Theater went into the larger proposal for money to turn the Victorian mansion into an avant-garde arts center on the eastern banks of the Willamette River. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Peter had gotten the money. He didn't. And that was the end of that.


I later used my interest in "idea theater" to join the team of an actress in town, who had learned that the Oregon Committee for the Humanities, more than the Oregon Arts Commission, would fund original drama if it had an Oregon history theme. I wrote three or four grant-supported Oregon history plays, which toured the state as part of Chautauqua, the best known being Abigail and Harvey. In one I also played a role and the summer of touring the play to small towns in Central and Eastern Oregon, for decent money, was a great experience. Man, the arts get productive when there's grant money around!


Here David Hare faces the current financial crisis, trying to make sense of it. This play deserves a much wider audience than I suspect it has gotten or will get. Excerpts:

Greenspan ‘In a market economy based on property rights it is critical to have as broad a swathe of people as possible with a vested interest in making that system work.’ Masa And George Bush then said, ‘We want everyone in America to own their own home.’ After that, the criterion for a loan became, ‘Can you breathe? If you can breathe we’ll give you a loan.’

 This isn’t a story about bankers fooling you. It’s a story about bankers fooling themselves. Author But I don’t get it. Turner Why not? Why don’t you get it? Author Because surely you have to deal with the fact that nobody understood these things. Turner Didn’t they? Author Nobody understood them. Even Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, dear old Greenspan – he didn’t understand them.

 Cohen When you model risk, you only model your own risk. You don’t model for the whole system. Banks were only interested in their own position. At no point did any bank ask, ‘What will happen if no one can borrow and no one can lend?’ That was outside the model.

 And observe, this is a new kind of socialism. Socialism for the rich. For everybody else it’s business as usual. In Michigan, in Cleveland, they don’t have socialism. They just have it on Wall Street. Everyone else is in as much trouble as ever.

 Author Since the 1980s people have been saying that markets are decent and wise. And now we know they’re not. They’re not. No one can look you in the eye and say markets work.

But clearly the lesson has not been learned.